Win the Innovation Race with a Low-Code Platform

AgilePoint, an established leader in the low-code BPM space, recently staged a webinar focused on the need to accelerate software innovation in the “age of the customer.” The event, which attracted nearly 300 registrants, featured Forrester Principal Analyst, Clay Richardson, as well as Kevin Brown, CIO of East Lake Capital Management; Niraj Tenany, CIO of Netwoven; and Adnan Qureshi, Development Manager for Dril Quip, each of which discussed his own organization’s successful applications of AgilePoint NX, a leading low-code application Platform as a Service.

The term “low-code” was originally coined in an August 2014 Forrester research report in reference to an emerging technology class, which, as Forrester defines it, includes “platforms that enable rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand-coding, and minimal upfront investment in setup, training, and deployment.”

“Given the rapid evolution of the IT industry,” commented Jesse Shiah, CEO of AgilePoint, “traditional development methods, including old-school BPMs, simply aren’t capable of building and delivering applications suitable for today’s multi-channel, multi-device environments at the speed at which enterprises require them. This technology shortfall has catalyzed the emergence of low code and will establish it as one of the most important technology classes for the coming years.”

Richardson, who led off the event, presented compelling evidence for the need for low-code platforms. Richardson pointed specifically to the inability of BPM suites to satisfy emerging requirements, commenting that BPM projects take too long, cost too much, and yield apps that are difficult to adapt to changing conditions. Richardson then detailed characteristics of low-code platforms that make them better suited for today’s requirements, including
• Virtually free experimentation on new ideas and low-cost testing of new apps
• The ability to deploy and scale apps in minutes
• The ability to generate mobile apps from older apps
• The leveraging of non-technical knowledge workers to build new apps

Kevin Brown, CIO of East Lake Capital Management, followed Richardson. Brown addressed the challenges and opportunities of the healthcare real-estate sector, focusing on the need for “rapid development around business processes and integration in business language” that would allow his enterprise to “realize M&A value sooner.” Brown then detailed the specific characteristics of AgilePoint NX that enabled East Lake to meet its development requirements, including its scalability, flexible licensing and its ability to fully integrate “across different cloud services.”

Brown was followed by Adnan Qureshi, Development Manager of Dril Quip (NYSE: DRQ), who outlined the challenges of process automation faced by his company, a global manufacturer of offshore drilling and production equipment. Dril Quip experimented with SharePoint 2013 as a workflow platform but quickly learned it was incapable of enterprise-class business process capability. Qureshi then explained Dril Quip’s qualification process for a new platform and reasons for choosing AgilePoint NX, a list that included scalability, governance capability, and hybrid capability—the ability to create workflows that incorporate actions from on-premises SharePoint farms and Office 365.

Niraj Tenany, CEO at Netwoven, was the webinar’s final presenter. Netwoven is a SharePoint-focused system integrator which was approached a large payment processing company that wanted to automate the process of creating business cases for funding approval. The enterprise had been creating business cases using using Excel files with an email-based approval process. Netwoven was engaged to replace the error-prone process with something more stable. Tenany then detailed the reasons AgilePoint NX was chosen as the platform for the customer’s new system, a list that included its ability to work across versions of SharePoint and Office 365 and provide enterprise-class low-code BPM functionality.